cognitive neuroscience

research

The Brain Dynamics research team investigates the temporal structures or chronoarchitecture subserving human perception and cognition. The team is part of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit (INSERM, Collège de France) hosted at NeuroSpin (CEA, DRF/I2BM).

Our work is committed to the view that perception and cognition rely on inferential brain processes. We tackle questions combining theoretical cognitive thinking with state-of-the art human neurosciences (using MEG, EEG, fMRI, psychophysics and any suitable methods to address the question).

Temporal Cognition (van Wassenhove, 2009, 2016, 2017): temporal cognition distinguishes two ways in which the nonverbal brain represents time: the interval sense and the phase sense (Gallistel, 1990). Interval timing is the ability of an organism to quantify and compare time intervals or durations; it is characterized by scalar properties. The phase sense refers to the internal mapping of events in time, supporting the ability to predict when an event will occur in a given period of time. Distinguishing interval timing from phase sense is functionally relevant because it allows positing distinct neural operations for handling time in the brain: whereas the mapping of events in time (phase sense) requires a mechanism to encode or time-stamp events in a cognitive map (in the manner we consciously map historical events on a calendar), estimating duration requires the quantification of internal distances and relational operations between two recorded quantities. Both are essential and complementary facets of temporal cognition. We are interested both in how the brain compute distances between events to yield estimations of duration (van Wassenhove & Lecoutre, 2014) within and across senses (van Wassenhove et al, 2008) but also the semantics of time and the ordering of events in the mind (Gauthier & van Wassenhove, 2016a,b).

Multisensory Integration:sophisticated sensory systems have endowed us with the ability to sense the environment and calibrate our actions towards it. Textbook knowledge distinguishes separate sensory systems (i.e. audition, vision, olfaction, …) yet their strict independence is a gross oversimplification of cortical organization. Understanding multisensory integration is a first step towards understanding how the brain builds abstraction out of sensory information. For this, which multisensory Gestalts operate in the integration process and how are they implemented? When do multisensory occurs in the brain? (van Wassenhove et al., 2005) What is the nature of multisensory or (supra)modal representations in the brain (Zilber et al., 2014)?